Organic Tablet Traffic Increases

If you’re wondering why your organic traffic numbers are on the increase in the last month, one segment of traffic to dig into is tablet traffic.

The ongoing struggle to track some tablet performance has been well documented — there’ve been tracking problems with iOS 6 visits since the platform launched. This is because a percentage of visits that were coming from organic search were mistakenly being attributed to direct because of missing referral information.

However, this problem was fixed with the transition to iOS 7 and was specifically fixed for iPads on Sept. 30th. That has resulted in an increase in tablet traffic being allocated to the organic channel instead of direct.

For our clients, we typically were seeing e-commerce sites with approximately 6% – 9% of their total organic traffic coming from tablets. For the month of October, that total organic traffic from tablets doubled to between 13% – 17%.

We also took a look at a few non-e-commerce clients who wouldn’t be seeing increases in search interest and demand due to the upcoming holiday retail period. Prior to September 30th, such sites were averaging slightly lower in terms of organic tablet traffic, around 4% – 5%. Now organic tablet is coming in at between 9% – 10%.

What is interesting for the ecommerce sites is that while tablet traffic is doubling, we have seen some examples where organic tablet revenue has actually quadrupled over the same time period, which has interesting implications in terms of the conversion rate or average order value occurring on that device.

According to comScore’s State of the U.S. Online Retail Economy in Q2 2013, there are over 60 million tablet owners in the U.S., a +32% year-over-year growth. Interestingly, tablet browsing indexes higher in some areas such as the apparel, home furnishings, books and movies when compared to other industries such as comparison shopping sites and computer hardware.